Roku Developer Program

[bathejasumeet]

Hi, I am done with development of a roku channel. The channel is supposed to be an update to an existing channel, sort of version 2 upgrade. Is it possible to release the version 2 of the channel as the private channel and then turn it into a public channel afterwards, given that the version 1 of the channel is public?
So, to summarize,
A) There is already a version 1 of the channel in the roku channel store, published as a public channel
B) I developed version 2 of the channel
C) I want to release version 2 of the channel as private channel
D) After the testing is done, I want to merge this version 2 with version 1 and make it public, so whenever people download the channel, they get the version 2, or the current channel installed is updated to version 2.

[beastman]

I don't know for sure, but that is what Tablo is doing. The current public Tablo channel is just a standard Roku channel, while the Tablo Preview channel, which is private is more like a Netflix or Hulu channel. It's just taking a while to get everythinh the original channel can do into the preview, so they have both channels.

[EnTerr]

Just create a new, private channel with the v2. That way you can distribute the vanity code to beta testers w/o disturbing v1 and both public and beta can be installed at the same time on the same player.

In addition, if they are signed with the same key, both versions will be accessing the same storage/registry (e.g. accounts, bookmarks). Later you can just take the blob from under the beta/private and upload it under the public channel*. I have done this and it works just fine. Just make sure nowhere inside it says "beta" or "private" obviously. You can upload different poster for the beta channel though, so it will be easy to distinguish on in player channel list (since posters are outside the bundle submission)